Refurbished IT goods find market in RP

The Philippines is a big consumer of second-hand information technology equipment.

This is according to James Savage, business development manager of the HMR Group, a multinational importer of recycled and refurbished IT products, which has a regional office in Manila.

Savage said every month HMR sells somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 units of refurbished computers, which the company offers under a three-month warranty.

"The market is a combination of personal users, schools and small and medium-sized businesses," says Savage, who also discloses that they buy old equipment from large local banks and other major corporations that have decided to upgrade their systems.

HMR, which has operated in the Philippines since 1986, also imports refurbished equipment from the United States and Australia. The company buys old printers, scanners, laptops, PCs and other computer peripherals. But personal digital assistants (PDAs) are still a rare buy being relatively new tools, Savage notes.

"We also recycle old, large mainframes, but the newer ones we refurbish. We do the same with servers," he says.

In addition, HMR buys and refurbishes telephone appliances, mostly PABx systems.

Without being specific, Savage says HMR, as to be expected, sells its second-hand equipment at a much lower price than the brand-new units. He admits that selling at competitive prices is also a matter of buying competitively.

"When buying old equipment, we take into account the age and the condition of the computers, plus the volume of units being sold to us. Computers tend to go down in value after a short period of time," he explains.

Savage says when times are difficult more customers are looking for good value to guard their bottom lines. "So we offer them equipment only with brand names such as HP, IBM and Compaq," he adds.

"Basically the reason (refurbished) computers can easily be sold in the Philippines is due to the presence of many users with requirements only for sending e-mail, word processing and hooking up to the Internet on a dial-up. In this case, a Pentium 4 is a waste of money, where we can sell a basic PC with all the accessories and warranty between P5,000 and P10,000 only. If they want something faster, it will be between P10,000 and P15,000 and all the way to P20,000," Savage explains.

HMR first tests all its purchased equipment to see which can be refurbished or recycled. Units that can still be refurbished get an HMR Technical Seal and go through a cleaning process using a special solution, Savage says. The equipment are then wrapped in plastic and sent to HMR store outlets nationwide. HMR employs 170 dedicated personnel to do the refurbishment of old machines.

Equipment that cannot be salvaged normally end up in HMR’s recycling company in the country called the HMR Computer Recyclers Australia Ltd. (CRA). Savage says CRA is the only PC recycling company in the Philippines.

"We repair using our large stocks of used parts coming from computers that we are not able to repair. So, any PC we can’t repair we take its parts. We do recycling and repairing in a strictly environmental way," Savage says.